Dyspeptic Oroborous: The Divine Hobby

A couple of days ago, my twitter feed displayed the following message from TCJ.com.

Today we worship the latest by @xaimeh with pieces by Dan Nadel http://bit.ly/oZjPF2, Frank Santoro and Adrian Tomine http://bit.ly/mV9U8W

I’ve liked things that both Dan and Frank have written in the past — Dan’s piece on the Masterpieces of American Comics exhibit was probably my favorite selection in the Best American Comics Criticism volume that Fanta published a year or so back. And tcj.com has been doing a lot of good things since they sent us packing (this lovely piece by Craig Fischer, for instance. So I was assuming that that “worship” was just a bit of jocular hyperbole. Obviously the pieces would be laudatory, but I had hopes they wouldn’t be sycophantic.

Alas, if you click the link you get what the tweet says; Jaime’s comics transubstantiated into communion wafers, less to be read and discussed than to be consumed as a path towards union with the divine. Thus, Frank expresses awe, reverence, and wonder, talks about breaking down into tears, lauds the purity and uniqueness of Jaime’s talent, and finishes up with what reads like literal hagiography.

No art moves me the way the work of Jaime Hernandez moves me. I am in awe of his eternal mystery.

Tomine’s piece is more of the same, albeit shorter. In comments, Jeet Heer suggests that it might be worthwhile to compare Jaime’s work to Dave Sim’s. This does seem like an interesting juxtaposition, but Frank nixes it insisting, “Lets be careful to not make this thread about Sim. This is a Jaime celebration.” No criticism at TCJ, please. Only celebration, worship, and gush.

To be fair, neither Frank nor Tomine are making any pretense of trying to explicate, or really even engage, with Jaime’s work. Instead, both of their pieces are testimonials — personal accounts of having seen the light. From Frank’s piece

Something extraordinary happened when I read his stories in the new issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories no. 4. What happened was that I recalled the memory of reading “Death of Speedy” – when it was first published in 1988 – when I read the new issue now in 2011. Jaime directly references the story (with only two panels) in a beautiful two page spread in the new issue. So what happened was twenty three years of my own life folded together into one moment. Twenty three years in the life of Maggie and Ray folded together. The memory loop short circuited me. I put the book down and wept.

We don’t need to see the two panels in question reproduced (or, indeed, any artwork from the story reproduced), because it’s not about the panels. It’s about the effect of those panels, and of Jaime, in Frank’s life. Jaime is transformative because Frank says he’s been transformed. It’s a witness to true belief by a true believer for other true believers. The imagery of short circuits and closed loops is unintentionally apropos.

Dan’s essay is nominally a more balanced critical assessment. In practice, though, it’s got the same religion minus the passion, resulting in an odd combination of towering praise coupled with bland encomium. Frank’s piece has the energy of an exhortation; Dan’s, on the other hand, reads like a painfully distended back-cover blurb. “The Love Bunglers”, Dan declares, is the story of Maggie “finally holding onto something.” Jaime’s art is great because it is personal, so that “this alleyway is not just any alleyway — it’s an alleyway constructed entirely from Jaime’s lines, gestures, and pictorial vocabulary.” And the big finish:

In the end we flash forward some unspecified amount of years: Ray survives and he and Maggie are in love and Jaime signs the last panel with a heart. “TLB” is also a love letter from its creator to his readers and to his characters. It’s a letter from an old friend, wise to the fuckery of life, to the random acts that occur and that we have no control over. Jaime, I think, used to be a bit of a romantic. He’s not anymore, but in this story he gives us something to hang onto: A piece of art that says that you should allow fear and sadness into your life, but not let those things cripple you. That sometimes life works out and sometimes not, but the things we can control, things like comics and storytelling, carry redemption.”

Let fear and sadness into your life but don’t let them cripple you. Sometimes life works out and sometimes not. It’s criticism by fortune cookie. And…signing the last panel with a heart to show us the power of love? Gag me.

The point isn’t that “Love Bunglers” isn’t great. I haven’t read it; I don’t have any opinion on whether it’s great or not. But I wish instead of telling us that this is one of the greatest comics in the world no really it is, Dan would have taken the time to develop an actual thesis of some sort — a reading of the comic that elucidated, unraveled, and interracted with its greatness, rather than just declaiming it.

I’m talking here specifically as someone who is interested in and conflicted about Jaime’s work. I would like Dan, or someone, to write something that would allow me to see why this particular sentimental melodrama dispensing life wisdom is better than all the other sentimental melodramas in the world that are also dispensing life wisdom. But instead all Dan provides is assertion (“It just works. They’re real.”), predictable appeals to vague essentialism (“There are no outs in his work — what he lays down is what it is.”) and paeans to nostalgic retrospection (“As I took it in, I realized that I remembered not just the moments Jaime was referring to, but also the narratives around those moments. And furthermore, I remembered where and how and what I was when I read those moments. I remembered like the characters remembered.”) If I am unconvinced by standard-issue authenticity claims and do not have years and years of reading Jaime comics to feel nostalgic about, what exactly does “The Love Bunglers” have to offer me?

Part of the trouble here may be that it’s difficult to write about something you like as much as Dan likes Jaime’s work. Love can sometimes reduce you to gibbering — which is understandable, though not a whole lot of fun to read for someone who isn’t under the influence of similar giddiness. I think it can also be especially tricky to write about soap-operas, where a large part of the point is personal emotional attachment to individual characters. If the narrative deliberately figures the reader as fan or lover; it can be hard to say anything other than, “I adore this character! I adore this author! I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love! It’s so awesome!”

I don’t have a problem with people writing to say that something they love is awesome. I’ve been known to do it myself even. But this is TCJ,…and it’s Jaime Hernandez — the most prestigious publication devoted to comics criticism focusing on one of the most lauded contemporary cartoonists. If they wanted to run one love letter, I guess I could see it…but two or three? Surely, nobody in TCJ’s audience needs to be told that Jaime is awesome. Everyone knows Jaime is awesome. Except, possibly, for a few weirdos like me who are waiting to be convinced. But if this is the case, why forego actual nuanced and possibly convincing discussion of his work in favor of vacuous cheering?

Partially no doubt it’s because comics remains permanently tucked in a defensive crouch. No matter how unanimous the praise of Jaime is, no matter how firmly he is canonized it will never be sufficient to undo the brutal unfairness of the fact that he’s not as popular as…Frank Miller? Harry Potter? Andy Warhol? Lady Gaga? Somebody, in any case, can always be trotted out to show that the really famous and canonical person you love is not famous and canonical enough.

But there’s also a sense in which TCJ’s tweeted fealty is less about Jaime (who surely doesn’t need the flattery) and more about the celebration of fealty itself. You worship at the altar of Jaime because worshiping at the altar of Jaime is what the initiated do. The sacramental praise both constitutes an identity and confirms it for others. You are in the club and enjoying the hobby in the proscribed fashion. Fellow travelers shall take you to their bosoms, and even the chief muckety-muck shall weigh in with a heartfelt and avuncular hosannah.

Comics was long a subculture first and a subculture second and an art a distant third. TCJ set itself to change that. Certainly, it has altered the list of holy objects. But the rituals remain depressingly familiar.

109 Comments

I haven’t seen the work in question yet but Jaime IS doing the strongest work he’s ever done recently and he’s the best we’ve got. Really, in my own opinion—no offense but if over the years I lived by critical opinions I would have read his work many years before I did and I would worship Watchmen.

I don’t think anyone’s begrudging anyone else their enjoyment of Jaime’s work. Noah admits he hasn’t read the story in question. The problem is that the acclaim in question is so fannish and narcissistic. Dan Nadel, et al. are using this story to congratulate themselves for being Jaime cultists. There’s very little interest in discussing his work in terms that make it clear why anyone outside the cult–and who has no real interest in joining it or any other one–should care. If I haven’t read the dozens of Locas stories that preceded this, am I going to find anything worthwhile about the piece?

The tell for how insular Dan’s perspective is comes when he reprints a panel depicting an alley accompanied by all the gush he can muster. I look at it and see a drawing of an alley. So what, you know?

“If I haven’t read the dozens of Locas stories that preceded this, am I going to find anything worthwhile about the piece?”

I think that is kind of the issue with writing about Jaime’s work, particularly the recent issue. I don’t think a new reader will really get as much out of it. There are Locas stories you could read without context, but I don’t think the most recent issue is one of those. It’s like watching the season finale of a really good (non-episodic) tv show without seeing the other 21 episodes. You can follow along with the plot, but the resonance isn’t there.

…If I haven’t read the dozens of Locas stories that preceded this, am I going to find anything worthwhile about the piece?
————————

Surely so; though those praising the story (which I’ve not yet read) assert that much of its emotional force comes from their having read, loved, and lived with the characters for such a significant part of their lives.

Which effect, for those who haven’t, would be rather hard to convey.

(For instance, many intelligent people — i.e., Eugene McCarthy — are fanatical about baseball, having caught the bug in childhood. I’ve a feeling all their praise of the ritual and poetry of the game, no matter how erudite, would fall on deaf ears, in my case…)

————————
Noah Berlatsky says:

…As I said in the piece, I do understand the impulse to be enthusiastic about something you love. I do feel like I want to expect more than that (or more than just that) from tcj though.
————————–

Sure. I think those pieces come across more as “in the heat of the moment” outpourings of delight. I’m looking forward to a more measured, thoughtful appraisal once emotions have settled down a bit…

Derik and Mike, I do understand the problem of conveying how an ending fits in with an entire work. But…any kind of writing or criticism has difficulties, surely? If the task is challenging, that seems all the more reason for the most important comics criticism site to make a real effort at grappling with it, doesn’t it?

“Sure. I think those pieces come across more as “in the heat of the moment” outpourings of delight. I’m looking forward to a more measured, thoughtful appraisal once emotions have settled down a bit…”

I’m with Mike here. Are we sure that this isn’t coming?

Maybe this kind of analysis is something to be expected from readers who are starting to read the series right now, and couldn’t be a part of its issue by issue release. But is the “I didn’t get to be a part of this” appraisal more worthwhile than the fan-gush? Maybe, because the number of people reading it anthologized, hundreds of new pages available at a time, will only increase, relative to the lucky few who shared Dan’s and Frank’s and Tomine’s experience.

As a new L&R reader, I’m excited to eventually get to read this issue, but a little intimidated that I won’t be able to read it this ecstatically, powerfully. But I’ve been loving it so far.

I had a big problem with the ending of this story (which I posted under Nadel’s piece), but I don’t see a problem with writing for extant fans of the series. Not all criticism (even the celebratory kind) has to be targeted at potentially new readers. That said, I do find the celebration a little too fannish, too much of “that’s so cool!” Which is what TCJ used to disdain in superhero fanboys. And I think that’s tied into just what the “ending” delivers, a confirmation that the story has always been about Maggie needing to get together with Ray.

This kind of “criticism” is called “impressionism” in my book. It mixes the personal (feelings provoked by the work) with the public (criticism proper, i.e.: a rational discussion of said work). Isn’t this confusion a sign of the times, though? I think it is…

It certainly doesn’t have to be targeted at new readers…but I just get such a sense form a lot of the criticism that there’s a frustration with Jamie’s low profile, and that the goal is to convince everyone that they should love him. Dan starts his piece with effusive canonical claims…and if you’re talking canon, it seems like you’re saying that you are trying to make the case to a broad audience.

I wonder if we should do a Jaime roundtable at some point? It would be helpful for me probably in approaching his work…and I know there are a range of opinions about him by folks who write here. Something to think about anyway….

Noah: I’m not saying I disagree with your points. I was just answering that other question about new readers. I’m not even sure how one would address a piece on the latest issue of L&R (Jaime’s part at least) to new readers. I don’t think you could. It would be a disservice to new readers, I think, because any explaining you tried to do of plot/characters/etc would not only not be enough information, but it would take away, I think, from the new readers enjoyment of the work as a whole (Locas in general I mean).

Which I guess goes to your point that the posts at TCJ are a kind of preaching to the converted fandom.

I do get the feelings of “Jaime has too low a profile” that you are detecting. It is, to a certain extent true, but that is a result both of how his work is put together (decades long serial narrative) and how most comics review/media (and comics review/coverage in non-comics venues) works. It’s focused on the new, the repackaged, and the complete. Which is, I would assume, why Fantagraphics repackaged the L&R stories in those smaller softcover volumes recently.

“I haven’t seen the work in question yet but Jaime IS doing the strongest work he’s ever done recently and he’s the best we’ve got.”

Who’s ‘we?’ I’ve read everything of his that’s in bookstore format and I couldn’t disagree with you more.

I have to say that this fan gushing is more reflective of the current web site regime than the print magazine. If memory serves right, Groth & Thompson pretty much avoided this sort of circle jerk mentality back when the magazine was alive and well.

The point you make about soap operas is kind of the key thing both in the book and in the response. Basically, Jaime’s work works by accretion—You meet some characters and little details are added slowly but surely over the course of many pages/years, and eventually, you just like the characters, are interested in what comes next, get invested in their lives, etc. While you’re waiting and wondering about one set of characters, some others are introduced, and you get invested in them, etc. etc. The whole thing is about subtle representations of human beings who are complicated and whose personality comes through in small moments and often tiny gestures. Weirdly, the early stories aren’t really particularly good (though the art is), but the character’s personalities are seeded there— So…it’s a hard thing to get started on in some ways–but I do think there is a payoff, in general terms. There are interesting things in the book in terms of race, gender, punk culture, Mexican-American culture, etc. —But rarely does anything hit you over the head as being “about big issues” (maybe it hits Ray over the head—there’s a joke there for the Love Bunglers readers). Mostly, it is just a soap opera without the bad acting, script-reading, and boring camera work. Jaime also draws beautiful pictures and beautiful people (which is maybe why you stick around long enough to get invested).

That said, I agree with Charles—the end of LB feels kind of manipulative and actually betrays some of the ways in which the series has worked since day 1. As an ending, it’s too pat…As just another moment in the serial, it’s too melodramatic. (I don’t know if it’s planned as one or the other). The end of the original L & R series (with Maggie’s reunion with Hopey in the back of a police car) was much more emotionally satisfying, subtle, and compelling.

There is a great double-page spread to set up the conclusion in this one…but the conclusion itself—I actually prefer to believe it was a dream-sequence. The thought did occur to me, and I went back and looked for some telltale signs without avail (maybe I just missed them).

The previous issue (New Stories #3), which Tucker wrote eloquently about last year, was far superior imo and really was a tour de force.

I also think Jaime’s stock is rising lately among the cognoscenti because Gilbert’s work of late has been not much to write home about. I’m sure someone will come along and tell me how brilliant he’s been…but since the end of Poison River, I’m finding it difficult to enjoy or care about G’s stuff. Jaime, for the most part, has been as good as ever…and occasionally better (my complaints about the end of this issue notwithstanding).

The question of how to integrate personal experience into criticism is an interesting one, to me anyway. I think it can work well sometimes; as with any aesthetic choice, it depends on the context and with how it’s used. James Baldwin’s essays on film are very personal and they’re really, really great.

I think Eric gets a lot of the attraction of Love and Rockets correct. I’m also with him on the aesthetic worth of the latest part (?conclusion) of The Love Bunglers. However, I don’t think the last two issues of New Stories represent the high point of Jaime’s work.

I’m really resisting commenting on this thread because my aesthetic point of view is so radically at odds with that of this site that there doesn’t seem to be any meeting grounds for a productive discussion.

But one thing I’ve been thinking about is that there seems to be some dubious and implicit gender politics in the use of the phrase “soap opera” as a term of abuse. If someone writes a long narrative sequence that features mostly male characters or deal with the male realm of politics and religion they are credited with crafting a roman fleuve (examples: Balzac’s Human Comedy, Trollope’s Barchester novels and Palliser sequence, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, Updike’s Rabbit novels, Hugh Hood’s The New Age, Roth’s Zuckerman books, Sim’s Cerebus). Yet if that someone creates a long narrative sequence featuring mostly female characters or dealing with domestic concerns that are viewed as feminine then the work is dismissed as being a soap opera (I’m thinking here of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence, Ellen Gilchrist’s linked stories, J. Hernandez’s Locas stories, G. Hernandez’s Palomar sequence).

To put it another way, both Cerebus and the Locas stories offer the pleasure of following a series of characters over many decades, the experience of sharing a life with these characters and getting to know their personalities and world more and more over time. Yet Cerebus is rarely if ever called a soap opera, largely because Cerebus is about as masculine (and masculinist) a work of art as is imaginable. Nor are Updike’s Rabbit books discussed as a soap opera, nor any of the other roman fleuves I’ve named. Even the Marvel comics of the 1960s and 1970s, which had strong elements borrowed from romance comics and soap operas, are rarely discussed as soap operas but rather as pop culture epics.

It seems that only works that predominately deal with female characters and those aspects of life that are typical denigrated as feminine are dismissed as soap operas. Isn’t there some unconscious sexism at work here? The situation is comparable to the way the word sentimental is used as a pejorative, largely because the sentimental tradition in literature has been a predominately female concern.
Or to put it another way: gender theorist, heal thyself!

I don’t know that affection was my motivation for reading their oeuvre. I like a lot of their early-to-mid-eighties work, not so much the recent stuff. For one, it does help deflect arguments from those who don’t understand criticisms that aren’t unreservedly positive.

“You meet some characters and little details are added slowly but surely over the course of many pages/years, and eventually, you just like the characters, are interested in what comes next, get invested in their lives, etc.”

No doubt certain details resonate more after having read prior stories. Hopefully, though, most serious readers would be more invested in having a worthwhile aesthetic experience than in identifying with the characters. Even though I guess a certain degree of identification is inevitable. Conversely, I can’t imagine anyone having investment of any kind in Gilbert’s last few decades of material. He’s certainly intended it to be that way. Or at least I think he has.

Hey Jeet. I wasn’t saying that soap operas are bad. I like a lot of soap operas, from Nana to Paradise kiss to x-men (which I really do always think of as a soap opera) to…well, the wire is a soap opera really. I don’t even hate Jaime’s soap opera, from what I’ve seen of it. But…soap opera is genre, and genre is genre; it can be great, but you don’t really get tons of credit for just wheeling out the tropes. So if you describe a soap opera to me and insist it’s a work of genius, I’m going to need more specifics than just “it’s a soap opera!”, just as if you described a ninja movie to me and insisted “It’s a work of genius!”, I’d need some fairly specific details that weren’t just, “this guy sneaks around and kills people! It’s cool!”

I really wasn’t intending to use soap opera as a pejorative about Jaime’s work. I wasn’t intending to say anything pejorative about Jaime’s work.

And your aesthetics aren’t far from lots of peoples who write for the site, as far as I can tell! I mean, lots of folks who write here like Jaime a lot. He’s got broad appeal; it’s why he made the top ten in the best of poll!

“Who’s we?”
I didn’t mean a “we” in the way of a HU unimind as some seem to want to impose on “this site” but rather a rough we, perhaps indicated by the attempts by comics scholars towards a canon of excellence in comics such as was attempted here with the best comics poll. I perhaps mistakenly thought that I could say Jaime is if not the, at least one of “our” best cartoonists, “our” being of America’s, of the world’s, of planets in the milky way’s….so sorry to include anyone else in my “we” though.

Hmm; not that anybody cares, but I think I’ll walk back the claim that the Wire is a soap. I think romance is pretty important to being a soap opera — part of the reason the genre is gendered (as genre’s tend to be.) Weeds, though, which I’ve enjoyed the first couple of seasons of, qualifies….

Eric more or less summed up my thoughts on Jaime’s work, so I’ll just piggy-back on his comment, and Jeet’s about soap operas.
I have a hunch that what makes Locas an important contribution both to comic, and to popular/mass culture writ general, is the way it balances evolution and real change with the comforts of formula. In other words, it avoids the one step forward two steps back trap that so many Superhero and Television soap operas fall into. This means that narrative change is actually change, which no doubt adds to the way they resonate with the reader’s life outside the text.
I haven’t read the second half of “The Love Bunglers,” but when I do, I suspect I’ll have more to say, if only because it sounds like the closure it offers could complicate future efforts, inasmuch as it gives the narrative a teleological element that, at least to this reader, it previously lacked.

That’s interesting. It is a real problem with soap operas that you end up having to escalate to keep (both writers and readers) interest. This killed Weeds, for example, which became unbearably improbable by the third season or so. Something like Paradise Kiss avoids it by not being all that long…but it sounds like Jaime gets around it by going back and forth in time, which is in fact a really clever solution. And one nicely suited to comics, with its space-is-time formal qualities….

Nate can rest assured that The Love Bunglers offers only marginally more closure than various previous “endings” in Love and Rockets.

That’s an interesting point, Noah. This is the first time I considered the problem of “escalation” with respect to Love and Rockets. I don’t think it actually happens. The rhythms are pretty natural as far as I can tell. And on the subject of romance-soap operas, those “hearts” at the end of chapters have occurred in the past. It’s a knowing and I suppose slightly ironic nod to the romance comics tradition.

…There are interesting things in the book in terms of race, gender, punk culture, Mexican-American culture, etc. —But rarely does anything hit you over the head as being “about big issues”…

…That said, I agree with Charles—the end of LB feels kind of manipulative and actually betrays some of the ways in which the series has worked since day 1. As an ending, it’s too pat…too melodramatic…
—————————

Not that it didn’t have its moments; but I prefer when Jaime handles the supernatural in an unsettlingly is-it-or-isn’t-it fashion, as when Maggie is briefly followed at night by a menacing pair of big dogs. (If I remember right, she was walking away from the smoldering ruins of Izzy’s house.)

Is Jaime better as a dramatist when he sticks to realism, mundane events? Conceits such as H. R. Costigan having horns or superheroines didn’t do much for me. His L&R sequence that burns brightest in my mind is a wordless one-pager: Hopey is awaked by the dawn, having slept in an abandoned car. Steps out, has a cigarette…

—————————-
…I also think Jaime’s stock is rising lately among the cognoscenti because Gilbert’s work of late has been not much to write home about. I’m sure someone will come along and tell me how brilliant he’s been…but since the end of Poison River, I’m finding it difficult to enjoy or care about G’s stuff…
—————————–

I’m not getting so many people’s assertion that the latest issue is some kind of ending. I think it underestimates the way Jaime’s narratives work to see it as an ending and not as just another change in the status quo (as has been seen numerous times during the serial).

Actually, thinking about it a little…the moving back and forth along the timeline interpolating events as you go is sort of what fan fiction does. I wonder if that dynamic is maybe also part of why there’s such an emotional reaction to it?

And before Jeet jumps in again…I’ve got nothing against fan fiction per se. In fact, thinking of L&R that way makes me somewhat more interested to try Jaime again than I was previously….

Setting yourself up for disappointment again? Unfortunately, L&R doesn’t really work that way. It’s a bit too worked out compared to most fan fiction hence the comparisons to Cerebus. Also, no one would say that Wide Sargasso Sea is better than Jane Eyre right (or that it enriches the latter)?

Jeet’s diagnosis accurately sums up the attitudes of the mainstream comics audience and creators. Although no doubt everyone else is subject to these biases in one way or the other. One weakness to that argument though is the tossing in of Sim & Hernandez with the likes of Balzac. Are the former’s works even remotely comparable in quality to the latter? And when the terms ‘soap opera’ and ‘sentimental’ are used to what degree is it because the reviewer is biased? To what degree is it because the work in question is tripe?

I do agree that Jaime has avoided a lot of the pitfalls that affect longtime serials. It doesn’t hurt that this is indie comics, the production is slower paced. There’s no pressure to produce at an overheated rate to please the audience. But that doesn’t mean that the work has been entirely successful as time has passed. Like with most serials, when you read it you still run into long periods where the wheels have completely come off the storyline. JH has certainly run into dead ends.

@Robert Stanley Martin. “I must say it’s interesting to read that a key reason for preferring Marcel Proust to the Hernandezes is the former’s ‘masculinist’ appeal.” As should be clear to anyone who reads with a minimum level of attention what I wrote, I wasn’t talking about the intrinsic merit of the works in question but rather the way they get classified (and in some cases dismissed). It’s undeniable that À la recherche du temps perdu is classified as a roman fleuve and also classified as part of a high-modernist tradition that critics have frequently celebrated in masculinist terms (i.e.: the great modernists were “master” writers who conquered language). If what I’m saying isn’t clear to you, please look up the voluminous academic literature on modernism and gender. A good place to start might be: Gender and genre in novels without end: the British roman-fleuve By Lynette Felber — she takes up the way works that are seen as too feminine get labeled as “soap opera.”

I have to add that one of the problems with posting on HU is that there are people here who willfully (or perhaps obtusely) misread opposing points of view, so you often have to repeat yourself at greater and greater length in order to get your ideas across. That’s not fun for anyone, nor is it intellectually productive.

Misunderstanding is part of conversation. And conversation isn’t an end point or a product, or at least that’s not all it is. That’s why I wasn’t particularly upset that you misunderstood how and why I was talking about soap operas in terms of Jaime’s work. These things happen, and sometimes lead interesting places. No need to turn up the flames, necessarily.

The book by Lynette Felber sounds interesting. Like I said, I think soap opera’s are gendered feminine, mostly because romance is and that is so central to soap operas. I guess I’d move to try to argue that “feminine” shouldn’t be seen as pejorative, and argue for the worth of soap operas as well in that context (which was sort of what I was trying to do in the post, though I should have been more explicit, probably) rather than insisting that people stop using “soap opera” as a descriptor on the grounds that it’s sexist.

WSS surely is as good as Jane Eyre–It’s a great book in its own right. And I’m a fan of JE. I also wasn’t putting Jaime down by calling his stuff soap opera. I’m a big fan for the most part (I voted for him in my top 10 if I remember correctly).

The book I mentioned is more about the roman fleuve, although soap operas get mentioned. But there is a pretty large literature on soap operas and serialized fiction that might be worth looking into. One book that explicitly links comics with both the Victorian serialized novel and soap opera is Consuming pleasures: active audiences and serial fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera by Jennifer Hayward — there is a long section in there about Terry and the Pirates

I’ve long thought it interesting the structural similarity between soap opera and professional wrestling storylines, where essentially the latter is the former with stylized violence and a hint of stylized sex replacing the stylized romance of the former.

Also, Jeet, your original comparison between Sim and J. H. is pretty interesting, and one worth making I think, though I’d probably come to pretty different conclusions than you as to their varied successes. It’s also instructive that at the time of the original serialization of Jaka’s Story, the book that is generally held up as Sim’s best, he credited reading L + R to the change in tone, wanting to craft a slower-paced domestic drama.

Noah, count me in for a Locas or Cerebus round-table. Or hell, why not both simultaneously?

You were claiming that Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, among other works, was being privileged over similar and ostensibly female-oriented material due to its focus on male characters and “masculine” concerns. The reason this is funny is that Proust is just about the last author I could see as a “masculinist” favorite. A literary critic of that bent would probably rate Proust’s work even lower than the “female” material. The narrator/protagonist is an effete, asthmatic mama’s boy, and a good deal of the work is about homosexuality. It’s overt with Proust’s handling of the Saint-Loup and Charlus characters. Proust masks it with his treatment of the narrator’s affair with Albertine, but anyone who gets that far in is usually aware that the relationship is based on one Proust had with a male lover. The “masculinist” mindset—more or less synonymous with machismo—is hardly one I would identify with privileging “the gay,” and your doing so, however inadvertently, struck me as more than a little absurd.

By the way, apart from the Proust, Powell, and Hood works, the books you cite—at least those by the male authors—aren’t generally considered roman fleuves. To call them so is really playing fast and loose with the term. Lynette Felber states in her book that Trollope’s Palliser and Balzac’s La Comèdie humaine novels are “proto-roman fleuves.” They’re more precursors than roman fleuves proper. It’s pretty specifically a modernist form. I don’t know where you’re finding the term used to categorize the others.

Finally, here’s a fun quote from Felber’s book:

While the length of the roman-fleuve would seem the major obstacle to its popular success, reviews of specific exemplars suggest that it is actually the perception of feminine features that negatively affects the genre’s reception. The adverse criticism of all three of the writers under discussion reveals a gender bias: Trollope, [Dorothy] Richardson, and Powell have each been criticized in language that suggests a lack of virility, an ambiguous gender, impotence, or, strangely in the case of Trollope, a woman’s sexuality—all deviations from the male “norm.” [23]

If you would like to specify other books that illustrate the “masculine” roman fleuve/”feminine” soap opera binary, please do.

Let me note what I should have said from the outset. There is no masculine roman fleuve/feminine soap opera binary at work in literary criticism, either now or in the past. I have no idea where Jeet’s getting this.

The roman fleuve [“river novel”] is a very idiosyncratic–and for most readers, quite abstruse–form of multi-volume fiction in which the main subject is the evolution of the narrator’s perspective as he or she progresses through life. A roman fleuve tends to be quite free-form and digressive, and there’s often not much in the way of plot or dramatic structure. The interest in these works generally comes from the author/narrator’s eye for detail, acuity of insight, and often sense of humor relative to what he or she portrays. The paradigmatic work in this mode is Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time]. It’s the one all others are compared to. If you write a roman fleuve, you are pretty much writing your version of Proust’s work. The other major one is Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. There are a few others of note, such as Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream, Anaïs Nin’s Cities of the Interior, and Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence. Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion should probably go in there, but I can’t recommend it to anyone with a straight face. In any case, the Proust and Powell works are far and away the most important ones.

The roman fleuve is absolutely not a term intended to describe just any multi-volume fiction featuring continuing characters. John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy is not a roman fleuve; it’s a character study of a working-class man at different points in his life. The authorial perspective and the protagonist’s perspective are very different, and neither really evolves in an epiphanic way. The character of course grows older, and Updike’s eye for social detail deepens, but the work doesn’t build its effects out of the reader’s awareness of that development. The books don’t grow into each other or otherwise play off each other very significantly. They’re all essentially stand-alone efforts. You can’t really read Finding Time Again, the last book in Proust’s work, without reading all of what came before. But you can easily read Rabbit at Rest, the final Rabbit novel, without reading the earlier ones in the series. The same is true of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman books, Trollope’s Barchester novels, and Balzac’s The Human Comedy.

Jeet’s right that the term “soap opera” has been used to disparage certain kinds of work, often by women authors, but I don’t think it’s necessarily work featuring women protagonists who deal with feminine domestic concerns. George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the novels of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë all fit that description, and I don’t think I’ve ever come across any of that work being knocked as a “soap opera,” at least not by anyone worth taking seriously.

The term “soap opera” is generally used to describe quotidian melodrama that relies on sensationalism and emotional hyperbole for its effects. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a continuing narrative feature. The continuing narrative feature has been a standard format for pop-culture work for most of the last century. All in the Family was a TV show where its audience grew older with the characters–it ran for a good decade–but that’s not a soap opera, it’s a situation comedy. The three main Law & Order shows had continuing characters that also evolved over the shows’ runs, but they’re not soap operas, either. They’re crime dramas.

Moving over to comics, the Locas and Palomar material get characterized as soap operas because they’re both quotidian melodramas. (I’m personally rather wary of calling Locas soap opera because the material I’ve read–and I’ve read a good deal of it–has always been pretty low-key dramatically.) Cerebus doesn’t get called a soap opera because the thrust of the work is satirical fantasy (one that grew increasingly solipsistic over time, but still). If Sim had turned out one sequence after another in the vein of “Jaka’s Story,” it would probably be called soap opera, too. The continuing-feature aspect of the material has nothing to do with the soap-opera label. I don’t see any masculinist/feminine binary at work; Sim and the Hernandezes just work in different modes.

I’m afraid I’m rambling, so in closing, let me just say I completely reject Jeet’s premise.Roman fleuves and soap operas do not make up an either-or binary, gendered or otherwise; they’re very different things.

Well, I think this issue risks sinking into a hopeless semantic debate about what is and isn’t a roman fleuve. One way out of that quicksand is to try and narrow this down to an area of agreement. Robert Stanley Martin writes: “Jeet’s right that the term ‘soap opera’ has been used to disparage certain kinds of work, often by women authors, but I don’t think it’s necessarily work featuring women protagonists who deal with feminine domestic concerns.” Just to clarify: I didn’t say that “soap opera” refers to just creative featuring women protagonists and feminine domestic concerns but also that these narratives have to feature long-running narratives (whether we want to call those narratives roman fleuves, mega-novels, serialized stories or linked stories is irrelevant: the decisive characteristic is long-running narration).

So, the question is: why are long-running narratives about women and feminine concerns almost automatically described as “soap operas” whereas long-running narratives about men and male concerns are given other names (whether its roman fleuve, the mega-novel, etc.). It seems to be that there is a suspect gender politics in automatically lumping in long, serialized narratives involving women or feminine concerns into a vague and unhelpful category of the soap opera.

Or to put it more bluntly, as far as I can tell there is nothing significant about the Locas sequence that would link it to actual soap operas like One Life to Live or General Hospital other than featuring women characters and feminine concerns. Everything about the Locas series — its tone, the nature and behavour of the characters, Jaime’s implicit moral point of view, and the visual techniques he uses — distinguish him from actually existing soap operas. So the fact that writers like Noah — who has admittedly only had a glancing acquaintance with Jaime’s work — throws around the word “soap opera” seems to me an example of lazy and knee-jerk criticism.

“So the fact that writers like Noah — who has admittedly only had a glancing acquaintance with Jaime’s work — throws around the word “soap opera” seems to me an example of lazy and knee-jerk criticism.”

Two points:

(1) I don’t see soap opera as a negative term in the way you do.

(2) It was the description by Dan, Frank, and others that let me to the term soap opera. That is, everything they seem to get out of Jaime’s work could easily be said about other soap operas. Since I don’t hate soap operas, that doesn’t make me think necessarily I would hate Jaime’s work. But since they seem to be trying to make the case that Jaime’s work is a uniquely important work of genius, the fact that they end up describing it in a way that makes it sound like many other soap operas seems to me to be a failure.

I did read Ghost of Hoppers, and I think “soap opera” is a fairly reasonable description of what I got out of that book…but perhaps my take would change if I read more of the series. The soap opera aspects in any case weren’t what I disliked about it.

The question of whether every long form narrative about female concerns gets labeled as a soap opera is interesiting…. As I said, I think romance is probably the central feature that defines something as a soap opera (along with the long form, multiple characters, etc.) Rosanne isn’t usually thought of as a soap opera, is it?

I am curious…do you feel the same about romance? Is any acknowledged gendering of genre unhelpful and suspect? It just seems to me like gender is so central to genre (they share a common root, even)….

Is “Locas” a pure soap opera in the line of “General Hospital?” Definetly not. But there are times when it certainly approaches that. Take a few stories from the late 80s- “In the Land of the Polar Bears” and “Ninety-Three Million Miles from the Sun.” The main strand in the stories involve whether or not Maggie will get back together with Hopey. Another example would be (spoilers here) that wince-inducing “secret marriage” story- “Everybody Loves Me, Baby” from the “Penny Century” book. I’d say “Locas” is some sort of hybrid. The more literary aspects are in the foreground with some stories; the soapy aspects in others. So to say that it’s never had anything in common with what one thinks of as “soap opera” is incorrect. Granted, the past decade or so worth of stories has been JH’s most consistently “literary” period.

…You were claiming that Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, among other works, was being privileged over similar and ostensibly female-oriented material due to its focus on male characters and “masculine” concerns. The reason this is funny is that Proust is just about the last author I could see as a “masculinist” favorite…
—————————-

What I recall from reading “Ghost of Hoppers” some months back is Maggie going back to her hometown and some sort of still-unresolved cliffhanger involving the Izzy character. If soaps are defined as plot-driven confections with no deeper themes behind the human interactions then that pretty much qualifies. Granted, the story is well-crafted and not histrionic; at times quite naturalistic.

I wouldn’t define soaps that way…in part because I think human interactions aren’t necessarily shallow. What made it a soap opera to me was the focus on romance, multiple characters — and yes, some of the sensationalist elements. There were bits that felt like as sit-com too…

Dokebi Bride, one of my favorite comics, is about female concerns (it’s a YA book focused on a girl’s coming of age, and on her grief over her grandmother’s death.) It doesn’t read as a soap opera though, because there’s little focus on romance (at least in the six volumes we have; it’s not completed) and it’s so focused on the central character rather than on an ensemble cast.

Anyway; I appreciate Jeet’s raising the issue, and Robert and other folks discussion of it. I’m interested in soap opera and genre more broadly, and I think this has been an illuminating discussion in various ways.

This may seem odd coming from me, particularly given how persnickety I am about the definition of roman fleuve, but I do think the term “soap opera” has become defined more broadly over time. It’s not unusual to see ’50s movies like Imitation of Life or Giant described as soap operas, and they’re obviously not serials. On the other hand, Mad Men is often characterized as a soap opera, but there isn’t much of the sensationalism one associates with the term.

Speaking of Mad Men, it and Locas are very similar in many respects. Both are very accomplished and elegant in terms of their presentation, and neither insults the intelligence. But the story material in both is often flat and underdeveloped. (To me, at least.) Both seem compulsively fixated on avoiding the sin of overstatement and other histrionics, but they don’t seem to have any idea of what to replace it with in terms of crafting the stories. And both have their devoted fan bases, with just about everyone else saying, “Meh.” You don’t see much in between with the audiences.

“I wouldn’t define soaps that way…in part because I think human interactions aren’t necessarily shallow. What made it a soap opera to me was the focus on romance, multiple characters — and yes, some of the sensationalist elements”

I should have included craft with my definition. If the artist somehow makes the characters come alive then its art; if the execution is hackneyed then…..

Robert, may the expansion of definitions be because of the lack of a better word? To the movies you mention there I would add something like Zola’s “La Bete Humaine.” Jawdroppingly sensationalistic, kind of soapy and great.

Back to Locas- I do agree that there has been a thinness over the years. The two stories I mentioned previously were the last ones where Maggie/Hopey were the focus as lovers. JH wisely got away from that. Unfortunately, once that main pillar of the series was removed the series quickly foundered. I think it took a decade before JH was able to find more solid grounding storywise.

One comment about pro wrestling- from what I understand fans of that sport probably have few complexes about calling it soap. Again, it’s mostly superhero fanboys who have the hangups with usage of the soap opera term.

I just remember; Modleski is the person who acidly characterized cultural studies as, “I am a radical, I like Dynasty, therefore Dynasty must be subversive.”

I love that; Feminism Without Men is so second wave and mean-spirited. You don’t see that sort of thing enough any more….
————————

The title seemed kind’a dumbass*; but Googlei’ng for more info, found it’s actually the more interesting “Feminism Without Women“. An enjoyable and convincingly-argued excerpt at http://tinyurl.com/3vqlkhp …

@Robert Stanley Martin. “John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy is not a roman fleuve; it’s a character study of a working-class man at different points in his life. The authorial perspective and the protagonist’s perspective are very different, and neither really evolves in an epiphanic way. The character of course grows older, and Updike’s eye for social detail deepens, but the work doesn’t build its effects out of the reader’s awareness of that development. The books don’t grow into each other or otherwise play off each other very significantly. They’re all essentially stand-alone efforts.”
Having re-read the Rabbit novels fairly recently I have to strongly disagree. I suppose it is possible to read them as stand-alone books but Updike really builds on his earlier books and the second half of the series (Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, and also the sequel Rabbit Remembered) are full of resonances and echoes of the first half of the series, so much so that a reader who starts reading with Rabbit is Rich would miss the emotional point of many of the events (i.e., you need to start with Rabbit, Run to realize why it is so important to Rabbit that he might have a daughter, why the incident with the grand-daughter nearly drowning carries especial weight for him, and why it is significant that he dies playing basketball.

I would make the same point about the Zuckerman books….

But to go back to the gender issue I raise, isn’t it likely that if Updike had written the Rabbit books about Harry Angstrom’s sister (a shadowy presence in the series) and had tracked her domestic life with the care he showed for Rabbit’s life in the course of four novels and a sequel, then wouldn’t critics describe the saga of the female Rabbit (i.e., the Doe tetralogy). It’s telling, I think, that the novels Updike wrote with female protagonists (The Witches of Eastwick, S., The Widows of Eastwick) were sometimes called soap opera.
Another example would be Margaret Drabble’s loosely linked trilogy comprising The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989), and The Gates of Ivory (1991). I’ve often seen these books dismissed as soap opera in a way that the Rabbit books or the Zuckerman books never are. So, again, there seem to be very basic gender assumptions underlying all this that you guys, for the most part, aren’t willing to confront.

“isn’t it likely that if Updike had written the Rabbit books about Harry Angstrom’s sister (a shadowy presence in the series) and had tracked her domestic life with the care he showed for Rabbit’s life in the course of four novels and a sequel, then wouldn’t critics describe the saga of the female Rabbit (i.e., the Doe tetralogy).”

See but…if they were books that dealt with domestic life, they’d be different books, right? That seems like a major change in theme and approach; it would transform what Updike’s doing. (I haven’t read the Rabbit books, but a male perspective is so central to everything I’ve seen by Updike….)

As long as there is gender difference (and yes, gender inequity), then the experience of the different genders will be different. One of the ways those differences are inscribed (perhaps perpetuated) is through different genre narratives.

I’d agree that you don’t want to denigrate feminine genres as opposed to male genres. But I don’t think it’s convincing to pretend that there is *no* gender inflection to genres.

To take the Claremont/Byrne X-Men as an example — a big part of the reason that that series had a relatively strong appeal to female readers (at least anecdotally) was precisely because it had stronger elements of soap opera. I think that actually made it *better* than many other superhero series — drawing on a wider range of genres and a wider range of audiences helped it get out of the insularity that has long plagued superhero series. But I don’t know how you would make that point if you insist that genres can’t be gendered, or that thinking about the gendering of genres is somehow anathema.

I guess the point is…some feminists do argue that erasing or refusing gender difference is the only way to be feminist. That isn’t where I’m coming from, though, and I think it really makes a hash of any effort to understand the functioning of gender within genre.

I also think it’s worth noting that Steven isn’t denigrating “soap opera” as feminine, but as lowbrow pulp, essentially, which is a different issue (and one that can be used against male genres like superhero comics just as well, obviously.)

@Noah Berlatsky. “As long as there is gender difference (and yes, gender inequity), then the experience of the different genders will be different. One of the ways those differences are inscribed (perhaps perpetuated) is through different genre narratives.” To put it another way, “as long as we live in a sexist society, we might as well use sexist critical language in a thoughtless and un-reflective way — and also resist any attempt to think about the gender assumptions under-riding sexist language.”
Given this argument, I’m looking forward to Noah’s next magnum opus, most likely titled “Bitch-Slapping the Hernandez.” In this critical masterpiece, Noah will argue that “Jaime is a pussy and Gilbert is a whore. Both brothers are cunts.” Surely this essay will rival Noah’s earlier triumph, the “Crumb is a shit-head” piece.

More specifically, about the Rabbit novels: those are very domestic books. They are all about Rabbit Armstrong’s marriage and various love affairs, as well as his troubled relationship with his son and daughters. True, the books do also deal with other things — Rabbit Redux has a long and (I think) unsuccessful excursion into racial politics and the 1960s counterculture. But really, the core of the books is Rabbits home life. If a similar series of books were written about a comparable female character, with the same balance of domestic life to other thematic concerns, then the book would undoubtedly be called a soap opera. The other thing I wanted to say about Updike was that he often cited Proust (along with Henry Green) as his major influence. In writing the Rabbit books, I’m pretty sure Updike kept À la recherche du temps perdu at the back of his mind (and also Joyce’s Ulysses).

About the X-men — as I hinted at above, I actually think that almost all the Marvel superhero comics starting from the early 1960s have a strong subtext borrowed romance fiction. Spider-man has a very active love-life, and almost all the Marvel heroes have some sort of romantic entanglement that stretches over many years. I think what distinguishes the Claremont/Byrne X-men was that this romance genre subtext was especially explicit and visible, and also that there were several very prominent and memorable female characters in those books (aside from Phoenix, also Storm and Kitty Pryde). From talking to fans of the genre (both men and women) I actually think that the romance subplots applied to both boy readers and girl readers. That is to say, for teenage boys, reading Spider-man was a way of reading a romance comic without embarrassment and without being labeled a sissy. Marvel comics are a kind of disguised romance comics, and again its interesting that when these comics are dismissed, the language of them being “soap operas” is deployed.

I would say at least 99% of what’s edifying about the latter Rabbit books is edifying without having the experience of read the first one. One is also not at a disadvantage if one reads Huckleberry Finn without reading Tom Sawyer. The same is not true with Finding Time Again. That’s like trying to understand a movie’s concluding scene without having seen the rest of the movie.

If memory serves, Updike does bring new readers up to speed enough so they can appreciate the resonances from the earlier books. In the case of Rabbit’s interest in his illegitimate daughter in Rabbit Is Rich, I seem to remember the primary resonance being that he was looking for another chance at a paternal relationship because of his growing estrangement from his son. There’s a lot going on in all of these scenes, and most of it refers to the specific book in which they appear. If all Updike was offering were resonances to the earlier books in the new ones, they’d be pretty puny in terms of what they had to offer. Self-referentialism for its own sake isn’t much worth bothering with, don’t you think?

Whatever a reader of the later Rabbit books might be missing out on by not reading Rabbit, Run–and I certainly don’t recommend they skip it, by the way–it’s nothing compared to what one would miss by trying to read Finding Time Againwithout first reading the rest of In Search of Lost Time. One doesn’t know the meaning of narrative complexity until one has read Proust. You might want to take the Search on. Swann’s Way is the first volume.

I Googled Updike, “Witches of Eastwick,” and “soap opera” together. All I could find were articles about a TV series that was based on the book. There wasn’t anything about the book being a soap opera itself. That’s not to say no one’s ever called the book a soap, but it seems pretty buried. I got the same results with “Widows.”

As for Margaret Drabble, I know the name and nothing else. No one has ever even tried to motivate me to read her. As such, I’m not going to comment about whether she deserves that criticism or not.

You might try Drabble’s The Ice Age…It’s a good book from what I remember (she’s A.S. Byatt’s sister, anecdotally–and Byatt has a somewhat soap opera-y tetralogy too, but it’s too snooty to be identified as such)

Jeet, I think you have it quite wrong about the young-male appeal of Marvel. I remember quite well my heyday of reading it in the eighties. Romance was certainly not what attracted me to them. How much romance did Byrne’s “Fantastic Four” or Simonson’s “Thor” have? Miller’s “Daredevil” did have some romance in it. But I wouldn’t say it was the inclusion of it that was attractive. It was that the comic seemed better crafted than anything I had seen at the time. Same with X-Men.

As far as Spider-Man goes, most readers go for it simply because he’s kind of cool. If there were no Mary Jane in it it wouldn’t make any difference to the typical reader of that type of thing.

So when the “soap opera” term is used against super-hero comics in most cases there are justifiable reasons for doing so.

”To put it another way, “as long as we live in a sexist society, we might as well use sexist critical language in a thoughtless and un-reflective way — and also resist any attempt to think about the gender assumptions under-riding sexist language.”

Would it be opening a whole can of worms here to say that this point of view is outdated and anti-science? And it has been at least since Camille Paglia’s heyday? You can’t possibly deny that there are legitimate gender differences that remain the same over the time that can’t be papered over. It’s not sexist to acknowledge this. There is room to acknowledge that and the gray area that exists somewhere in the middle between the two gender poles, whatever its actual size. Nobody here has denied that there are biases that should be examined. The question is how large that bias is and if the bias exists because the work itself is “feminine,” or simply because it sucks.

@Steven Samuels. “I think you have it quite wrong about the young-male appeal of Marvel. I remember quite well my heyday of reading it in the eighties. Romance was certainly not what attracted me to them. How much romance did Byrne’s ‘Fantastic Four’ or Simonson’s ‘Thor’ have? Miller’s ‘Daredevil’ did have some romance in it. But I wouldn’t say it was the inclusion of it that was attractive. It was that the comic seemed better crafted than anything I had seen at the time. Same with X-Men.”

Well, I mentioned the Marvel comics from the 1960s onwards (i.e. the ones created by Kirby, Ditko and Lee). Of the ones you mentioned, the ones I’m most familiar with are Miller’s Daredevil (where the Daredevil/Electra relationship was a central plot point) and the Byrne/Claremont X-Men (where all the major characters had complicated love lives). Byrne’s Fantastic Four, from my distant memories, did deal with the ups-and-downs of the Reed and Sue Richards marriage and also Johnny Storm’s love life (in that sense, as in others, it very consciously echoed the Kirby/Lee Fantastic Four).

As to why readers read these things — let’s put it this way: most of the readers, as far as we can tell, were teenage boys. Now teenage boys, from my memory of adolescence, think about sex a fair bit and are starting to be interested in girls. So it makes sense that popular comic books would combine these two male interests and have stories about superheroes who have romantic lives. Perhaps you were an especially asexual teenager who cared only for the aesthetics of a well-crafted comic. But most other teen boys who read these things were surely partially attractive to them by the romantic subplots, which promised to unveil the secrets of dating and heterosexuality (and, in later comics, dating, heterosexuality and homosexuality).

Is being opposed to sexism anti-science? I can’t see how since opposition to sexism, like opposition to racism, is based on a philosophical commitment to equality, which is really unrelated to science one way or the other. In any case, I don’t think Camille Paglia is an authority on science, or (with the partial exception of a small area of art history) an authority on anything else.

@Robert Stanley Martin. I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on Updike. I think Updike spent a lot of effort making the last two books echo and expand on the themes of the first two books, so it’s a shame to think that this contributes to less than 1% of the value of those books.

““as long as we live in a sexist society, we might as well use sexist critical language in a thoughtless and un-reflective way — and also resist any attempt to think about the gender assumptions under-riding sexist language.””

Oh, come on now. I didn’t say anything like that. You’re just being silly at this point.

And Crumb remains kind of a shithead about both race and gender. It seems weird to get so permanently and repeatedly upset about scatological imagery when one is so enamored of Crumb…but worship isn’t about consistency, I guess.

Oh…and I agree with you, Jeet, about the romance in Marvel books. Lee, Kirby, and Ditko wrote romance too, and monster comics, part of what they did was to mash up all those genres with superheroes. They tended to stay really focused on males and male fantasies though; Claremont/Byrne were a lot more open to female perspectives, I think. Again, in that context, I feel like the “soap opera” term is more positive than negative….but also that it indicates a real difference between what Claremont/Byrne were doing and what the older titles were doing.

Steven, I don’t think anyone (certainly not Camille Paglia) has shown that gender differences are innate. But certainly, innate or otherwise, they exist in various contexts, including general genre preferences.

You’re skewing what I wrote. My point was that I don’t think readers who haven’t read the earlier books are operating at a significant disadvantage when reading the later ones. I also don’t think Updike was so arrogant in crafting those later efforts that he made them inaccessible to new readers.

@Robert Stanley Martin. It’s not a matter of arrogance but rather Updike wanting to create a work that was cohesive and formed an organic whole. You can of course read any book in the series as an individual unit (just like you can read many of the Locas books individually) but the optimal reading experience is to start at the beginning and work towards the end. The sheer duration of spending all that time with Rabbit and his family, the accretion of experiences from book to book, and the deepening of Rabbit’s memory of his life from volume to volume, all contribute to the richness of the reading experience.

Noah Berlatsky. “They tended to stay really focused on males and male fantasies though; Claremont/Byrne were a lot more open to female perspectives, I think.” I think that’s right and perhaps on this note of agreement we should call it a day.

The famous Latin phrase “de gustibus non est disputandum” is absolutely right. That’s what I called a private sphere of taste which includes aesthetic feeling. Said feeling is incredibly volatile: we may feel it in front of a particular work of art to feel absolutely nothing at a different time with a different state of mind (let alone two different viewers, of course; or readers, or listeners…).

Why do we discuss art, then? Because there’s a public sphere that’s rational. I’m not saying that feeling is completely excluded. Probably it started the critic’s will to write about the work, but that’s what I would call a pre-critical stage.

Many problems (arguments) could be avoided if people recognized that there’s nothing personal in a discussion about these matters… What we’re discussing are collective criteria (discussions among an interpretive community, as Stanley Fish would put it).

…As long as there is gender difference (and yes, gender inequity), then the experience of the different genders will be different.
———————–

Hooray, something we agree on! (Though I can see the statement being attacked for non-PC-ness; I’ve been damned as hopelessly sexist for saying as much.)

Ah, here we go:

————————–
Jeet Heer says:

@Noah Berlatsky. “As long as there is gender difference (and yes, gender inequity), then the experience of the different genders will be different. One of the ways those differences are inscribed (perhaps perpetuated) is through different genre narratives.”

To put it another way, “as long as we live in a sexist society, we might as well use sexist critical language in a thoughtless and un-reflective way — and also resist any attempt to think about the gender assumptions under-riding sexist language.”
—————————

—————————
Noah Berlatsky says:

Oh, come on now. I didn’t say anything like that. You’re just being silly at this point.
—————————

Ah, he’s just demonstrating how…

—————————
Jeet Heer says:

…one of the problems with posting on HU is that there are people here who willfully (or perhaps obtusely) misread opposing points of view, so you often have to repeat yourself at greater and greater length in order to get your ideas across. That’s not fun for anyone, nor is it intellectually productive.
—————————–

To take the Claremont/Byrne X-Men as an example — a big part of the reason that that series had a relatively strong appeal to female readers (at least anecdotally) was precisely because it had stronger elements of soap opera. I think that actually made it *better* than many other superhero series — drawing on a wider range of genres and a wider range of audiences helped it get out of the insularity that has long plagued superhero series…
————————-

Thoroughly agree here too. (I’ve fond memories of that Claremont/Byrne X-Men…) I like that you specify that it had elements of soap opera; that’s more precise than saying that superhero comics that pay some attention to the characters’ love lives — or pro rasslin’ storylines — are soap opera.

Which they’re not, any more than the Indiana Jones movies are. In soap opera romantic relations and possible pregnancies are front-and-center; the MAIN source of dramatic interest and conflict.

Where the pejorative connotations of the term come in, is that these — soap opera devotees, correct me if I’m wrong — tend to be treated in a histrionic, melodramatic fashion rather than naturalistically or with literary sophistication. (An understandable approach, though, considering the “Romantic Perils of Pauline” demands of the soap opera genre.)

This melodramatic and histrionic approach applied to tales of love-troubles is what accounts for the term being frequently used as a put-down; not because of a work’s simple focus on romantic travails, ere “Madame Bovary” would’ve been dismissed by all those sexist male critics of later times as “soap opera,” no?

Domingos, I actually disagree that these issues aren’t personal. People’s selves are not just located in them; they’re public too (like language, which is interior and exterior.) So the stories people identify with and the images they identify with are very much who they are — which is why these conversations can get heated.

Mike, that scientific evidence is just really tendentious. Evolutionary biology is not nearly a science in the way it’s proponents like to claim. I don’t think nature and nurture can really be separated in most cases.

There can be great soap operas which are very sophisticated and insightful. I think I mentioned Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss and Nana, which are both fantastic.

That’s a good point, Noah. I view these aesthetic discussions pretty much like political discussions. It’s just that I see myself as capable of disagreeing politically with a close friend, if you get my drift… Maybe some people can’t do that?…

Anyway, my main goal when I separated feelings from thoughts and the intimate from the public was to create a kind of detachment in the latter. For instance: I see religion as such an intimate and irrational matter that I find all discussions between believers and non believers completely absurd.

In the end I would postulate that what’s not rational can’t be discussed.

Oh, and I think you can discuss lots of nonrational things, including religion. I’ve gotten a lot from reading many theologians, for example, even though I’m not a believer. Reason is certainly one way of discussing communal human experiences, but I don’t think it’s the only one.

“As to why readers read these things — let’s put it this way: most of the readers, as far as we can tell, were teenage boys. Now teenage boys, from my memory of adolescence, think about sex a fair bit and are starting to be interested in girls. So it makes sense that popular comic books would combine these two male interests and have stories about superheroes who have romantic lives. Perhaps you were an especially asexual teenager who cared only for the aesthetics of a well-crafted comic. But most other teen boys who read these things were surely partially attractive to them by the romantic subplots, which promised to unveil the secrets of dating and heterosexuality (and, in later comics, dating, heterosexuality and homosexuality).”

Granted, romance has been a strand in certain series from time to time. But usually it’s been no more than a strand. And yes, of course adolescents think about sex often. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is going to reflect that. Does baseball card trading involve thinking about sex? Or shopping? Given how marginal an activity regular comic book reading has been for any given group of kids, I’d say the main attraction for reading them has been merely for the cheap thrills. The diversion. And let’s not forget, the Comics Code Authority was in full effect for decades. Sex or romance was kept submerged, neutered. If we were talking about manga, then yes, I would agree that even for males romance could be part of the attraction. Given how tame mainstream comics have been in relation to other mass media (before recent times anyway), there’s no reason to think that comics would be what kids would gravitate to for that fix. Has mainstream comics ever produced something like “Twilight,” for instance? No, for the most part American comics have been condemned to producing “Betty & Veronica.”

In my estimation, any child who read a Marvel comics for the romance was a minority within the minority of those who actually looked at them.

The problem with declaring inviolate differences between the genders, and then saying “difference doesn’t mean superiority” is the same problem with the old “separate but equal” schooling ruling. In theory, this is true—but in practice, we as a society have a tendency to separate things in order to “prefer” one over the other, often leading to oppression of the “other.” (white over black, man over woman). There’s no reason why creating categories necessarily has to lead to this, but history shows us that it often (always?) does. For that reason, putting pressure on the notion of “essential” differences is an important political/philosophical practice, even if (in certain instances) it may well be “objectively” incorrect. Noah is right in noting that untangling the “natural” from the “social” is a nearly impossible practice—esp. given recent evidence that “nurture” and “experience” actually do impact and transform the genetic to some degree.

Likewise, the “reason/emotion” division is a similarly problematic one in the Domingos thread. It’s Habermas, of course, who believes in (and insists upon) the rationality of the public sphere. This claim is not exactly uncontroversial (esp. from a feminist point of view).

Sorry, Noah, but I don’t see much point in the discussion. Bert says it perfectly:

“If you don’t have the slightest suspicion that there might be some kind of God character, and you’re not doing anthropology, or some hideous Joseph Campbell breathless syncretism self-help, WHY in Gaia’s name are you talking about religion?”

I’m not a Christian, but I don’t think that means I can’t find Christian ideas beautiful or profound. And, again, I think there’s a lot more in our heads than reason, thankfully — there’s enough of belief and unbelief in our selves (which are not only inside us anyway) that I think discussions with people who disagree with us our always internal as well as external.

Sure I am; as much as I’m discussing whether or not I’m discussing God’s existence with you.

Discussion doesn’t have to mean prosletyzing, on either end. And since our selves aren’t unitary in themselves, division of opinion in conversation isn’t any more confusing or irresolvable than the division of the self — which is confusing and irresolvable in some ways, I guess, but not in all.

Bert’s aware that I don’t think God exists. He talks to atheists all the time, and was one himself until recently.

I’d say that like most people I hold conflicting and non-absolute opinions, which I (and others) label in various ways. Virtually all of those opinions exist in language, which is inside and outside me. So I don’t really see the point in saying, “you can’t talk about this if you have different opinions.” Selves and thoughts aren’t circumscribed in that way.

And of course individuals can vary considerably, and people have the capacity — to varying degrees — of improving areas where they are weaker, and vice versa.

But then, people do react like in my cartoon ( http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/scientist-feminist.jpg ); in the same way that an Intelligent Design advocate would leap upon a paleontologist’s saying that they don’t know everything about prehistoric life-forms as an admission that they know nothing, and are therefore operating solely upon FAITH, and intellectually no more defensible than the Bible-thumpers.

—————————
…and then saying “difference doesn’t mean superiority” is the same problem with the old “separate but equal” schooling ruling. In theory, this is true—but in practice, we as a society have a tendency to separate things in order to “prefer” one over the other, often leading to oppression of the “other.” (white over black, man over woman). There’s no reason why creating categories necessarily has to lead to this, but history shows us that it often (always?) does.
—————————-

Yes, unfortunately…

————————
For that reason, putting pressure on the notion of “essential” differences is an important political/philosophical practice, even if (in certain instances) it may well be “objectively” incorrect…
————————–

Those scientists weren’t arguing for anything as sweeping as “essential” differences. And, to those uncommitted folks, wouldn’t making arguments that may be ideologically enlightened, but ” ‘objectively’ incorrect,” be weakening the important part of the message?

On the one hand, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” is literarily superior and stirring. Yet anyone not blinded by PC-ness is perfectly aware that it ain’t so.

Rather than insist that no matter what pesky “objective” reality may show, everyone IS indeed born equal — and thereby undermine your entire case, give ammo to your enemies (“These liberals are saying that a Pygmy would be as good a basketball player as a Masai!”) — I’d prefer a more complicated, but accurate statement…

Noah: “I don’t really see the point in saying, “you can’t talk about this if you have different opinions.””

This is a huge misrepresentation of what I mean with this whole discussion. It’s not just a matter of opinion, it’s an impossibility. What you are doing in the example above (let me remind you: “God’s intelligence is before the world; it’s the most natural thing. It’s what creates everything else. So intellect isn’t artificial, or at least God’s isn’t.”) is saying previously “OK, let’s suppose that god exists… [you’re mimicking theologists, you even write “God” with a capital letter!] s/he’s so and so, then…” You need to do this because if you don’t the only answer to everything that Bert says is: that’s absurd, god doesn’t exist! The problem with discussing the existence of god is that rationality clashes with faith. You can’t discuss something that was born from faith because it simply is. No rationality can grasp that.